1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for grouping images by face, and more particularly, to a method of grouping images by face based on group photo information.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Digital photography has revolutionized both professional and consumer photography. Elimination of physical film in digital cameras makes photography more cost effective by reducing film and photo development costs. Further, hundreds or thousands of digital images captured by the digital camera may be stored in a single flash memory card, such as a CompactFlash (CF) card, a Secure Digital (SD) card, or a Memory Stick (MS) device. Thus, digital photography has increased the number of people taking digital pictures, and also increased the number of pictures taken by each person, leading to a massive increase in the number of digital images generated by users.
Due to this increased amount of digital images generated and stored by users of digital cameras, organization of the digital images in a way that makes it easy for the user to locate and view a desired image becomes necessary. For example, the digital images may be timestamped, such that the digital images may be organized by date, month, or year. The digital images may also be tagged by the user, though this requires an inconvenient amount of manual input by the user.
More recently, face extraction algorithms have been developed for extracting face pixels from digital images, and face recognition algorithms may be utilized for grouping of images by face. In other words, face pixels from one image may be compared with face pixels from another image to determine similarity between the face pixels from these two images. If the face pixels from both images are sufficiently similar, the face recognition algorithm may group the images together. This is illustrated in FIG. 1. As shown, eleven face regions may be grouped into a first group 100, a second group 110, and a third group 120, respectively. Thus, the face recognition algorithm may determine who appears in the digital image, and multiple digital images may be linked by which people appear in the digital images. However, the face recognition algorithms used for comparing the face pixels of the multiple digital images often provide ambiguous results. In other words, even if the same person appears in two images, the algorithm may determine the same person is two different people if he/she is wearing a new set of glasses, or has put on make-up.